The Hearts of the Falmer (1)
by robinwitch1
Summary: The first three chapters in the story of how the Falmer were freed from the Dwemer curse that blinded them and stunted their growth. Madena, the pacifist battlemage in Dawnstar, tries to make sense of a new series of dreams she's been having, at the same time Erandur, the former disciple of Vaermina, tells her of something strange hidden under the ancient ruin he lives in.


**The Hearts of the Falmer**

Prologue: One of Our Own

The stone bed was slippery with her blood. Splashes and drips of it trailed all across the floor to the entrance, marking a glittering path along which she had been carried into this dim and ruinous Dwemer chamber, lit only by a profusion of glowing mushrooms growing along the far wall. She moaned softly, steadily quieting as the life slipped out of her to pool and glitter on the floor. Her eyes were shut tight, face twisted with pain, but even the strength for that was fading, each shudder less violent than the last.

There was the sound of soft but hurried footsteps, and two figures entered the room. Falmer; one young, and one much older, limping noticeably, in the dress of a shaman. They hurried to the bed. The shaman laid his hand on the girl's brow, and she quieted at once. When he removed it, she raised her own hand weakly as if to draw it back, and then let her hand fall back again with a low moan.

"You are determined to attempt this?" the young Falmer said, in a tone that expressed doubt and exasperation in equal measure. "One so young can scarcely be considered essential. It was an accident. And you were injured yourself."

The reply was immediate, the old shaman's tone sharp and impatient.

"Have you learned nothing, Elchinor? You are supposed to be the most intelligent of your group, and you ask questions like that? Has all the time spent studying our history been wasted on you? When the faulty Dwemer strut broke and the wall caved in, this girl and her mother thought first to push me out of the way of the falling rock. They put my safety before their own. Now her mother is dead, and the girl is on the point of death, but I have a life-debt to her and that debt I must at least attempt to pay. Such things are not to be treated lightly. We are a people betrayed over and over again. Of all things, we cannot afford to break faith ourselves. If we do that, we will fall lower than the Dwemer."

As he spoke, the shaman ran his hands over the girl, exploring her injuries. He sighed and shook his head.

"A struggle to bring her back to life and health, true. _Just a slave_, true – yes, I know very well what you are thinking! But loyalty goes both ways, Elchinor. She is one of our own. Another thing never to be forgotten."

He paused briefly.

"Now to work. Listen carefully, Elchinor. In such cases, judgment is the key to success. You cannot afford to waste time and energy with mistakes. The long, deep slash in the leg... it's going to leave quite a scar whatever we do... here is the source of the worst bleeding... an artery cut..."

The room began to glow a warmer light, as the shaman cast restoration spells, one after another, the pace at first rapid, then more deliberate. The girl's moaning stopped as she slipped from coma into a more natural sleep. In place of an agonized grimace, her face now took on a gentle smile that neither of the Falmer tending her would ever see. But the old shaman could sense the change in her condition through his fingertips as he made a final check, and he nodded in satisfaction.

"Bring two of the others to carry her to her quarters, and see that someone is by her to console her for her mother's death when she wakes up," he said, shaking his head with weariness and leaning against the stone bed for support. "I will be fine in a moment or two," he added, as Elchinor, sensing his difficulty, reached out to steady him. "It was not quite as bad a case as I had feared. I am not yet as feeble as you young ones sometimes like to imagine."

Elchinor turned to go. He began to worry, the same worry that ate at him every time he had the privilege to witness the Old One at work: the Old One thought so much more clearly and deeply than he did, more deeply than anyone did. Even among the Great-Minded, in all the warrens, none was his equal. If he passed, who could ever take his place? It was not likely to be him, Elchinor was sure of that.

"Bring someone to clean up this mess as well," the shaman added, calling after Elchinor as he left. "It smells like a Dwemer torture chamber in here."

-o-o-o-

Chapter One: Bearing Witness

The horse was overloaded and tired, stumbling along the path toward Dawnstar. Thank goodness it was daytime. They should be at the Windpeak Inn before dusk. He hoped his timing had been right. With any luck, there would be a Khajiit caravan camped outside the town in a day or so, and he would be able to cash in some of the junk he'd picked up before both he and his mount collapsed under the weight.

It had been a good job. _One more for the practiced hand of Gjord Glassfist_, he thought to himself. _I'll have to raise my rates._ A group of gold miners working out of Dawnstar had hired him for a preventative strike. Cave; Falmer infestation, recently established; narrow entrance not practical for a group to fight through; clear the bastards out with a surprise attack before they took a fancy to the newly opened mine across the ridge owned by his clients. Most sellswords would have passed on a contract like that. It had words like _ambush_ and _suicide_ written all over it in the invisible script that only an experienced fighter can see. But they were Falmer, after all, and he knew their weaknesses. He'd remembered his father's axiom, _No equipment is too expensive if it saves your life,_ and sunk every last gold piece of his savings into a pair of leather boots with the strongest stealth enchantment he'd ever seen or heard of. Eleven thousand motherless septims. At the time, handing over all that cash to the grinning Breton he'd bought them from had been just slightly less painful than cutting his hand off. Now, he was looking at double or triple profit, even if he passed on reselling the boots. As always, his father had been right.

What would his father have done about the girl?

He glanced back at his overburdened horse. She was tied on its back, trussed up like a sacrificial goat, hands tied to the saddle as well after the third or fourth time she'd tried to get free. With a blanket roped around her, there wasn't much to be seen, but she was young, very fit, dark-haired, pretty in a grim way... and dead set on killing him. Or as second best, killing herself. He'd only managed to capture her because she had been unlucky, missed her footing, and knocked herself out on a wooden mine prop. Without that bit of luck, she'd probably have had his head. She wasn't blind like the Falmer; the boots hadn't fooled her.

The one swing she'd taken at him with her fire-enchanted glass battleaxe, now a prize part of his loot, had gone through a hardwood strut as thick as his lower leg as if it hadn't been there. And if he hadn't jumped back just in time, he wouldn't have been there either. He shook his head, remembering.

_Oh, just kill her_, a voice whispered to him. _Here and now. She isn't any use to anyone. She won't ever be a servant, or a stallkeeper in the market, or a farmer's wife, or a sellsword like you. Just a dead weight and a danger. Until someone puts her down. Mad dog. You can't cure a mad dog, only kill it._

But he was stubborn, all the Glassfists were, and his father had told him over and over again that even a sellsword didn't kill the helpless. Sure sign of a coward, his father had said. He'd missed his chance if a quick sword stroke really were the best solution. What could he do with her now?

_She's insane,_ it occurred to him finally, _that's the way to think of it. The Falmer have taken her mind. What's her name, that know-it-all court mage in Dawnstar? the one who keeps on saying that violence is always the worst way to deal with a problem? Always tsk-tsk she is, and disapproving looks, when you run into her at the inn on a winter's evening. Enough to make your ale go sour. Let's see if she can put her money where her mouth is. After all, the mad are supposed to be the business of mages and priests. That's where she can go._

-o-o-o-

Chapter Two: The Pasts Come Calling

The dreams were back.

But not nightmares this time, nor shared with every sleeping resident of the town. She'd asked around, discreetly, so as not to stir up memories of the past. This time, the dreams were hers alone, specific to Madena, Madena the Old some called her now, pacifist battlemage to the Jarl of Dawnstar. They persisted beyond sleep to flicker like will-o'-the-wisps around the edges of her waking consciousness, words more than images; what pictures there were were blurred and tentative. And a voice, a querulous, wondering, wandering voice, like an old man made child again by the unimagined treasures before him, stumbling out fragments of doggerel verse as if what he saw deserved a greater dignity than mere prose.

_Deep in Dwemer ruin they stay, hidden from the light of day..._

Dream enigmas half-hidden, half-revealed, the voice sometimes turning impatient at her inability – it seemed to assume, her reluctance – to understand clearly.

_I am but my master's voice, come to guide you in your choice...climb the height, seek the light. There are those who know, if you but ask, for aid in this your fated task._

What choice? What master? Ask whom? What task? And who in Arkay's name was the speaker? Where was he? Was he alive or dead? Damn the riddling old nuisance and his third-rate poetic obsession. She didn't appreciate anyone taking her as a fool, even in a dream. He hadn't provided answers to any of the important questions. Not yet, anyway.

She shook her head to clear some of the fog brought on by lack of sleep, and put on a thicker cloak. _Climb the height. So u__p the hill we go._ Not a bad idea to do a little asking around. Maybe that priest, Erandur, would know, the one who had helped deal with the plague of daedra-driven nightmares that had tormented them decades ago. He and the Dragonborn; but the Dragonborn had gone traveling now that things were settled with the dragons, off in Morrowind somewhere, people said, back some day "soon" but no one knew quite when. The priest, as far as she knew, still lived up there in the Tower of Dawn on the crest of the ridge above the town, serving his little shrine to Mara. But she wasn't quite sure he would be present. She hadn't seen him in Dawnstar itself for a long time.

_Climb the height, seek the light._

She pushed open the door of the White Hall and emerged, blinking, into bright morning sun reflecting off the snow, flexing her fingers. No harm in having a spell or two ready, just in case.

It was a short journey on foot to the Tower of Dawn, and peaceful. She had not really anticipated any danger. Trolls and wolves had fallen further and further back into the wilds as humans reasserted their control over the countryside, and the dragons themselves were harmless now, distant shapes circling around the mountain peaks deeded to them by the Covenant of the Children of Akatosh. Only the Falmer looked capable of causing trouble, and only for those who insisted on confronting them in the gloomy reaches they called home.

Before she could knock, the door opened and Erandur stepped out, dressed as always as a priest of Mara, but with a sword belted over his robe. He glanced left and right, uncharacteristically tense, and only then turned to address her.

"Madena... a lucky coincidence. If it is coincidence. I was planning to come down and ask your advice about some things that have come up, and there you are. Please come out of the wind... it's been a long time, hasn't it... months..."

"It has," she said, and stepped inside. From past visits, she knew what was there: a spare but neat room, living quarters and shrine of Mara, and behind the lectern a magically locked gate leading to the rest of the old temple, now sealed away. The only novelty was a large table in front of the lectern piled with books and the ruins of books, some neat and clean, some disfigured beyond all hope of reading.

"You've been doing some research, I see," she remarked, and walked over to the table. "I wonder that you can get anything at all out of some of these." She picked up and opened one charred volume, which promptly fell to pieces in her hands. "If that's what you wanted help with, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you," she said, brushing the black flakes off the sleeves of her robe. "The School of Destruction is a one-way street. I can't un-burn things, never could, more's the pity."

"Not destruction," Erandur replied. "I know how you feel about violence. It's something that has been preserved. Perhaps. At any rate, I didn't want to start meddling with it before getting a second opinion."

"You haven't yet said what _it_ is, remember. I need some detail if I'm to be of any use. I have enough puzzles on my plate already."

"No one knows how old this tower is," Erandur began. "Or how many times it has been rebuilt on the same foundations. But it seems that its association with Vaermina may go all the way back to the very distant past. A few weeks ago, I was clearing away some of the old furniture in the alchemical laboratory – actually I was looking for a bookshelf that was still sturdy enough to hold some of my volumes and light enough to move out here to the temple area – when I found a few sheets of folded parchment in a crack in the wall behind one of the old bookcases. I could tell from the parchment that it had once been protected with warding spells, powerful ones, but by now, these have faded to the point that they are scarcely noticeable."

Erandur turned to a shelf behind him to pick up a thin folder. Slowly and carefully, he handed it to Madena.

"See if you can make anything of these," he said. "I think I've gotten the general meaning, but it's too important to guess, so I'd like you to read them as well."

Madena opened the folder and inspected the contents. There were three sheets of parchment, two small and one medium, so old and brittle that it was difficult to handle them without doing damage. The ink had faded and the parchment had darkened with the passage of centuries, so that in many places the text was scarcely readable. But it wasn't hard to get the general meaning.

"My Old High Elvish was never what you might call fluent," Madena said after examining the first sheet. "But this is interesting. Very. Let me see if I'm getting the same out of it that you are... The first sheet is a formula for a potion, but not like any formula that I've ever seen before. A lot of ingredients that I don't know here. I can't follow the instructions for compounding it very clearly, either, if that's what this passage in the second section was talking about. The next paragraph mentions the Miasma several times – that was the gas that sent the people in here to sleep, wasn't it? It seems to be saying that the above potion is safer than the Miasma for very long-term use, and other comparisons... I can't follow that section very well either, too much of the vocabulary is strange to me."

"I understood it much the same way," Erandur replied. "And it is very obscure, though I probably know the alchemical jargon a bit better than you do. There's too much damage to follow the recipe without guessing. Ingredients would be another problem – one or two I can't even identify yet, and some of the ones I can recognize are extremely rare and either very expensive or almost impossible to obtain. But it seems to be a liquid variation on the Miasma gas formula, one that has been refined or modified in some way to make it less dangerous to the health and sanity of the user."

"Still wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole myself, though," Madena replied, shaking her head. "Now let's see the next sheet...Oh. Now look at _that_. A procedure to do... who knows what? Set an altar or a platform of some kind on fire – with what, oil? – and throw these things into the fire... I recognize the Elven word for glowing mushroom, don't know the others... something about the full moon... probably have to do the ritual at that time... and a door in the side of the platform will open. Damn these ancient structures, they're like onions, always another layer to discover. And then? Hmmm... something like 'open the refuge and greet the lost, and guide them to the open air.' Something still alive down there? After all this time?" She looked at Erandur. "They didn't know about this hidden chamber when you were a priest of Vaermina here, did they?"

"There were some vague rumors," he replied. "But nothing clear enough to follow up. And the chamber would have been forever closed to us anyway. The area they are describing as the site of the ritual to open the way later contained the altar for the veneration of the Skull of Corruption. We could never have thrown oil over that and set it alight, no matter what treasure was said to be behind it. But I'm sure something is down there."

"Not _something_," Madena said, her voice sharpening. "It's _someone_. You realize that, don't you? Some kind of living being. Hidden away down there. For a good or evil purpose? I have no idea. This could be very, very dangerous, Erandur. The best thing to do with this document might be to burn it right now, and leave whatever's sealed up there undisturbed, to sleep forever."

She paused for a long moment and looked at him.

"But you're not going to do that, are you?"

He replied only, "Read the third one. It's long and difficult, and the writing is tiny, and the text is broken up in places, but I think you'll get the main meaning, and you may understand some passages that still puzzle me. Go ahead, read it."

Madena carefully picked up the folder again, and moved the third parchment to the top so that she could read it. For a long time she stood there, absolutely still, only her eyes moving slowly down the text. Then she put the folder down, abruptly, and reached her hands up to her face to rub her eyes. She sniffled a few times, and then looked daggers at Erandur.

"You might have told me it's a love letter," she said in an accusing tone. "Now the whole thing is personal. Not just a cleaning-up job. A debt. You _know_ that you can't read something like that and not be drawn into it, become part of it. You tricked me, damn you." But her anger had drained away by the time of her last utterance, and her complaint carried no weight, even to her own ears. She produced a cloth from her sleeve and noisily blew her nose as Erandur sat there and waited for her to compose herself again. Then he asked a question.

"Do _you_ see any possible danger now?"

Madena shook her head. "If this letter is authentic, no. Written by the man who sealed them in, who died down there while they slept, because that was the only way he could be sure they would be secure, the only way he could be sure there was no clue remaining to tell their pursuers where they had gone. A party of refugees, on the run from something. He sealed the only entrance to their sleeping chamber with powerful warding magics, _from the inside_. But of course he couldn't get out himself then, and so he died there. Because he loved one of them, and pitied them all."

"Is that what the last passage meant?" Erandur said.

"Hm... I think so. But then this word...damn the parchment, it's almost given way here...move the light a bit, would you?"

She fixed her eyes on the text and did not stir for several moments, long enough to make Erandur worry that she might forget to breathe and fall in a dead faint onto the table. Finally she stirred. "Oh, so _that_ was what they were running from. I think I knew who they were now, when they lived, and how they came to be here. That word _there_," she said, indicating a blurred scrawl perilously close to the edge of the crumbling text. "You do know what it means, don't you?"

"No, I don't. To the best of my memory, I've never seen it before."

"Well, it's not as if they've been all that common for the last few score centuries or so. It's the word for what we would call a snow elf. Or Falmer, though the two aren't the same." Madena tapped the parchment lightly for emphasis. "They were snow elves."

"That explains the invocation of Auriel here," Erandur continued. "Right below it... the elven god of the sun. I had wondered why that was there. They were a small group of snow elf pilgrims, I suppose... yes, there it is. I suspect they had walked the pilgrim path that the Dragonborn took much later... I'm not sure, but I think the best guess might be that they were in Hidden Valley at the time the Snow Elves yielded to the Dwemer, and when this group came back and learned what had happened, they tried to escape rather than submit."

Madena continued to scan the parchment, with the occasional half-suppressed sniffle that she tried desperately to conceal. "It's a pity that this section here has partly disintegrated... but I think I can put most of it together. They were running, wanted criminals with nowhere to go, trapped, with their only choice whether they wanted to be killed by the Nords or by the Dwemer. They found this tower... a residence then, not a fort or temple... and, desperate I suppose, begged the wizard who lived here for aid, or failing that, a quick death...he chose to aid them and they stayed with him for a time... and then the Dwemer seem to have picked up their trail again. And... I think... by that time, the wizard and one of the female members of the party, a sorcerer like he was, had become... very close. So he took them all... I think about six in the group... to a secret chamber cut into the rock in an even earlier age, far below this tower... the upper parts of the tower seem to have been quite different then, who knows how many times these foundations have supported a new building?... He concealed them down there and put them all to sleep with a modified version of the Miasma... it doesn't say if he was a devotee of Vaermina or whether he simply learned the formula from one of her faithful and worked on it himself afterward... so that his love and her companions could outwait the Dwemer.

"But it wasn't enough merely to put them to sleep. They had to be sealed away too, or they would just be _killed_ in their sleep. And this had to be done from inside, as we just read, to ensure it could not be detected from the outside. And it had taken more of the drug than he had anticipated to prepare them for the centuries, and there was none left for him. So it says that he was..."

Erandur cut in: "_Will_, I think. Future tense."

"Says that he _will_...damn his tiny handwriting...leave information to explain what had happened, protected by wards and enchantments against being discovered by the wrong people. That must be what we're reading now... And then he will seal the chamber, lie down at the foot of his sleeping beloved's sarcophagus, and take poison. And remain with her gift forever? What does _that_ mean? His bones, or something more? Perhaps he's still haunting the chamber down there, then. Hope he doesn't give us any trouble...

"The last part has almost fallen to pieces but I think it was personal... how much he loved her. See, there, that sentence that's almost intact – he thanks the gods that they were able to be together, even for such a short time. He writes it more than once, I think. But the parchment has decayed there, near the bottom edge, and most of what he wrote at the end has gone to dust."

They sat down on opposite sides of the table, the parchments on the table between them, deep in their own thoughts. Madena was about to begin speaking again when the silence inside the tower was shattered by the noise of someone pounding heavily on the door. She glanced at Erandur, who responded with a puzzled shrug, before getting up and going to see who was there.

"A message. It's for you," he called from the open door. "You'd better talk with this fellow. Something's happened in Dawnstar, I think."

"It never rains but it pours," Madena muttered to herself, "First, a secret sealed chamber thousands of years old, with a romantic history and a stash of drugged Snow Elves, and _now_ what? I can hardly wait to find out." She rose from her seat and walked to the door, taking her time about it.

When she reached the door, Madena saw that the messenger was not a courier or a soldier, but rather some anonymous hanger-on from the Jarl's personal staff. Must _really_ be something big, she thought, to get one of those to run to anything other than the dinner table or the mead barrel. She gave him a sour look and said nothing, but he continued to wave his arms, too excited to notice any snub more subtle than a knee to the crotch.

"The Jarl has need of your services, Madame Mage, and the matter is urgent. Please come with me at once." He didn't so much deliver a coherent message as puff the words out, one by one, in Madena's general direction, gasping like a grounded fish. _Obviously in no shape to send running up any hillside on any errand at all_, Madena thought with a passing touch of amusement. _They must need me pretty badly if they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for people to go searching. Let's pray that the tubby oaf doesn't spoil the day by keeling over dead as the result of this sudden test of his physical fitness._

The messenger was out of line in a few other ways as well, and Madena decided she needed to set him straight before anything else. "Wait just one minute," she snapped, in an exasperated voice, as he reached out to tug on her arm. "I am the Court Mage, _not_ the Third Assistant Part-Time Chambermaid. I need to know the wheres and whys and whats and whos of a situation before I jump into the middle of it. What on earth has happened to bring you here in such a state?"

Getting the details out of him proved trying, since he remained breathlessly incoherent, was none too bright at the best of times, and tended to go back and forth several times over the same points, forgetting what he had already mentioned. But with Erandur's assistance, Madena eventually managed to put together a picture of what was going on.

Just after she had left Dawnstar, some sellsword or other had brought in a madwoman, or what he said was a madwoman, all tied up, for Madena to practice her arts on. He had found her in a Falmer warren, he told the guards. The madwoman had been quiet until after the sellsword had departed, and they had left her to wait for Madena's return, bound, in one of the chambers directly off the main hall of the Jarl's longhouse. But somehow she had gotten at least partially free. A quick-witted guard had managed to slam and bolt the door on her before she escaped the room, so she wasn't running loose, but from outside it sounded as if she was venting her rage and frustration by smashing everything in the room that she could get her hands on. And there matters stood for the moment: since she was not in her right mind, and was no danger to anyone else for the time being, they could hardly kill her, but they couldn't just leave her there either. For one thing, at the rate she was going, sooner or later she would manage to bash a hole in the wall, and then they'd be forced to use their weapons on her for their own safety.

"Where did the sellsword go, the one who found her?" Erandur asked at the end.

The messenger replied, still wheezing, "We don't, we don't exactly know. He didn't stay long. Said he had to catch up to a Khajiit caravan on the road, that they owed him money or something."

"Oh, rubbish," Madena snapped. "If the caravans are keeping to schedule, and there's no reason to believe they're not, there will be one in tomorrow. The next isn't for ten days or so. If he'd wanted to find a caravan that badly, he would have waited a day for the one that's coming, not gone running off after one that had more than a week's head start on him. He just told you the first thing that came into his head so that he could dump the girl on you and leave in a hurry, and you simple-minded fools swallowed it whole."

"You'd better go," Erandur said to Madena. "We can't do anything about this other affair for a while anyway. I have to figure out the rest of the details of the ritual to open the door, and I'll probably have to make a trip to Windhelm to get some of the materials. I doubt that our local alchemy shop has them. Besides, it's new moon tonight. We'll have plenty of time. I won't try anything without you knowing about it first, anyway."

Madena nodded. "It's not as if there's any hurry. So many years... another month or two won't make any difference. And we have to think of what to do with them as well, after we release them – presuming they're still alive. I can't even imagine how confused and upset they will be at all that's happened since they went to sleep. The very _last_ thing we need is for them to develop mental problems from the stress."

Erandor stood thinking for a moment.

"I may know someone who can help with that too," he finally said. "She has a _unique_ understanding of what they've gone through, let's just leave it at that. But I don't know if she's got the time to come all the way up here. She's a busy person. I can ask, though."

"Please do. I'll be back as soon as this crazy lady is taken care of. Mind you, that might take a while. It sounds like a stubborn case. If there are any urgent developments, you'll be able to find me easily enough in Dawnstar. I doubt I'll be doing much traveling in the near future."

It was not until Madena was half-way back to Dawnstar that she realized that she had completely forgotten to tell Erandur about the dreams she had been having. _Oh well_, she thought. _Time enough for that later_. If there was a delay, perhaps that rhyming old fool would provide more details to work with. Something a bit more specific than _climb the height, seek the light_, she hoped.


End file.
